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Theodore Dreiser quotes
Words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean. Little audible links, they are, chaining together great inaudible feelings and purposes.
Theodore Dreiser
I acknowledge the Furies. I believe in them. I have heard the disastrous beating of their wings.
Theodore Dreiser
If I were personally to define religion, I would say that it is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance.
Theodore Dreiser
Shakespeare, I come!
Theodore Dreiser
The most futile thing in this world is any attempt, perhaps, at exact definition of character. All individuals are a bundle of contradictions-none more so than the most capable.
Theodore Dreiser
The Irish are a philosophic as well as a practical race. Their first and strongest impulse is to make the best of a bad situation-to put a better face on evil than it normally wears.
Theodore Dreiser
She had no desire for accuracy, no desire for precise information. Innate sensuousness rarely has. It basks in sunshine, bathes in color, dwells in a sense of the impressive and the gorgeous, and rests there. Accuracy is not necessary except in the case of aggressive, acquisitive natures, when it manifests itself in a desire to seize. True controlling sensuousness cannot be manifested in the most active dispositions, nor again in the most accurate.
Theodore Dreiser
Few people have the sense of financial individuality strongly developed. They do not know what it means to be a controller of wealth, to have that which releases the sources of social action-its medium of exchange. They want money, but not for money's sake. They want it for what it will buy in the way of simple comforts, whereas the financier wants it for what it will control-for what it will represent in the way of dignity, force, power.
Theodore Dreiser
Let no one underestimate the need of pity. We live in a stony universe whose hard, brilliant forces rage fiercely.
Theodore Dreiser
Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.
Theodore Dreiser
A man, a real man, must never be an agent, a tool, or a gambler-acting for himself or for others-he must employ such. A real man-a financier-was never a tool. He used tools. He created. He led.
Theodore Dreiser
How true it is that words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean.
Theodore Dreiser
Love is the only thing you can really give in all this world. When you give love, you give everything.
Theodore Dreiser
When a girl leaves her home at eighteen, she does one of two things. Either she falls into saving hands and becomes better, or she rapidly assumes the cosmopolitan standard of virtue and becomes worse.
Theodore Dreiser
It is a sad thing to want for happiness, but it is a terrible thing to see another groping about blindly for it, when it is almost within the grasp.
Theodore Dreiser
The conventional mind is at best a petty piece of machinery. It is oyster-like in its functioning, or, perhaps better, clam-like. It has its little siphon of thought-processes forced up or down into the mighty ocean of fact and circumstance; but it uses so little, pumps so faintly, that the immediate contiguity of the vast mass is not disturbed. Nothing of the subtlety of life is perceived. No least inkling of its storms or terrors is ever discovered except through accident.
Theodore Dreiser
Oh, the moon is fair tonight along the Wabash, From the fields there comes the breath of new-mown hay; Through the sycamores the candle lights are gleaming On the banks of the Wabash, far away.
Theodore Dreiser
I believe in the compelling power of love. I do not understand it. I believe it to be the most fragrant blossom of all this thorny existence.
Theodore Dreiser
When a man, however passively, becomes an obstacle to the fulfillment of a woman's desires, he becomes an odious thing in her eyes, - or will, given time enough.
Theodore Dreiser
Among the forces which sweep and play throughout the universe, untutored man is but a wisp in the wind. Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.
Theodore Dreiser
Nothing is proved, all is permitted.
Theodore Dreiser